Rain, Rain

Early autumn is a wet time of year here. Rain-heavy clouds spin out of the North, West, South, and loosen their burdens before passing on. Sometimes the sky closes and the sun disappears for weeks on end. It can be a gloomy, grim time for those still hoping to cling to a bit more summer.

But I love it. Granted, the prolonged rain can be problematic and tiresome, and I do miss the sunshine, but it is so beautiful. Colors are deep and vibrant, washed clean by the rain and unbleached by the sun. It’s cool enough for a flannel shirt in the morning, a small fire in the evening, cups of hot tea and cocoa and steaming bowls at every meal. A light but incessant breeze soughs in the trees, and I am home. These sounds, smells, colors, conditions echo in my heart and settle with the well-worn comfort of old jeans. I am home.

Rain drips from the eaves, pecks on the roof like a flock of birds. Shallow puddles bleed out from the grass, fill the tracks of the driveway, huddle in small pockets on the sidewalks. Trees and bushes swing with the breeze, dance with a gray sky. It is both bleak and beautiful. And I love it.

Photo courtesy of Harshad Sharma.

Changing Seasons

With the traditional close of summer last weekend and the official close only a week and a half away, people are starting to gear up for fall. Autumnal colors have cropped up in displays and advertisements, and Halloween accoutrement are beginning to appear in stores everywhere. Seasons are changing.

I know a lot of people are somewhat saddened by the passing of summer, especially those who have to go back to school and those who see fall as little more than a harbinger of another winter. But fall is my favorite season. It has been for as long as I can remember. Summer was always great – full of days spent in the sun and water, watching clouds and rolling in the grass – but autumn brought the year’s best weather and brightest colors. It meant going back to school and re-joining friends I had not seen all summer (and, yes, I was one of the few children who didn’t mind school). Fall also meant the sweets and candies of Halloween, the fantastic dishes of Thanksgiving (as well as the leftovers for the days that followed), and, if we were lucky, the first snow.

Now my point of view is different, but my enjoyment and excitement have hardly changed. Autumn contains the last opportunities given by the living seasons – begun in the first green shoots of spring and finished in the last colored leaves of fall. It is the last chance to get out there and shake a leg before the frosts become icicles hanging from the eaves and a howling winter wind drives us – and most other animals – inside for shelter and warmth. It is a celebration of life, of having survived thus far.

It is also a reminder that winter is just around the corner. It is a last chance to settle warm-weather affairs and prepare for the cold-weather challenges to come. It is a reminder that to all things there is a season, and that someday Death will nip us as easily as frost does flowers. It heralds an end of things, but also the hope of new beginnings, however far off they may seem. And what a way to go: all beauty and color and light before that last long darkness.

I love fall. I hope you will enjoy it as well.

Surprise Lilies

As long as I have lived here, surprise lilies have bloomed every summer in two patches, presumably planted by some former owner (as I and my black thumb have planted nothing surviving more than a couple seasons). One patch out in front of the house ringed a small decorative tree which died long ago, leaving them isolated in the middle of an open, grassy yard; the other patch, out back, circled two still-lively oaks. But most years they hardly bloomed, and lately had managed only half a dozen blossoms altogether. I thought their soft pink faces were slowly dying out.

But this summer has been wetter and cooler than most, and when they began to bloom it was clear that this year the surprise lilies were going to live up to their name.

I’ve counted 66 buds and blossoms so far. Out front, the lilies have sprung up in their circle like an overgrown fairy ring. And the oaks out back are wearing a frilly pink skirt above their spreading roots. It’s beautiful, and totally unexpected.

What a lovely late-July surprise.

Insect Affinity?

I’ve never minded bugs but was never exactly fond of them, either. If they were outside minding their own business we got along fine, but indoors they were fair game and I can’t imagine how many have expired under my command. But it seems that lately I’m becoming more and more tolerant of them. This is not true for ticks, chiggers, mosquitoes, eye-diving gnats, biting flies, and other annoying pests, which still receive the business ends of fly-swatters, newspapers, bug-zappers, and hands. I mean “regular” old bugs. Beetles and crickets and that sort.

When I recently ran across a millipede in the house, I scooped it up and released it outside instead of squashing it as I probably would have last year. Late one night I discovered a large beetle in the trash can (someone else threw him away, alive) and I simply could not leave him there to suffer under the dirty diapers, plastic wrappers, and empty cans that would inevitably follow. So I grimaced, dug him out of the garbage, and set him on his way outside. Only to find his twin (or mate?) crouching at the edge of my bed. So I took that one out, too, and wished them both well. I’ve shooed black wasps and dirt-dobbers to safety, plucked ants out of danger, scooped moths from sure death, and twice rescued the same large gray bug from an unhealthy curiosity of seats.

I don’t know why. They are just insects. They are one of the most successful breeding groups the Earth has ever seen, without the lure of soft fur and innocent eyes, without the loving minstrations of a human populace. Perhaps I like their blind determination. Maybe I sometimes feel like a bug myself, trying to avoid that great windshield of the unexpected. Maybe it began as a kid when I was careful to place the wooly bears and caterpillars I played with back in safe places after I finished playing. Perhaps it had something to do with a movie where a holy man would not knowingly injure so much as a worm – even when undertaking a construction project – because, he said, all life was important.

Yesterday a large moth landed in my hair. One thing that bothers me a lot is something messing about in my hair. But instead of being annoyed and trying to immediately flip him out, I just let him walk around. I was enjoying the morning coolness on the front porch, in no hurry to really start the day, and I decided to let him take his time as long as he “behaved.” For a while he barely moved and I thought perhaps he’d flown away without my knowing. But then, no, I felt him shift and suddenly he was crawling down the side of my face. Again I had the urge to brush him away but resisted. His feet tickled. His wings were soft. And he meant no harm. So I left him be, perching on my cheek for a few moments before trundling down my neck (he tickled so that I had to laugh just a little). He walked halfway down the front of my shirt then paused, and I was better able to inspect him.

I can’t say he was a beautiful moth, not in the way that some are colorful and patterned to rival butterflies, but he had lovely little bands on his legs and a dark mottling that was itself quite intricate with little dabs of white and orange. He was pretty. And he seemed to be a bit lost, or perhaps was just out exploring a bit in the early morning. At any rate, he wasn’t bothering me so I made no attempt to bother him. He soon fluttered away, having rested up or spotted a cozy-looking tree or finished exploring the unfamiliar geography of the front porch’s latest addition. I bade him well and was glad I hadn’t simply brushed him off. It was an interesting and pleasant experience.

Perhaps I am just beginning to look a bit closer at the world around us, of which insects are an integral part. In the grand picture, I am hardly more than a bug myself, so maybe this is a sort of newfound empathy for small things in a large, confusing, and often hostile world. I don’t know. But I like it. And I think that this search for beauty unexpected is revealing a surprising amount of beauty everywhere … even, perhaps, in me.

Storm Sunset

A few days ago a small thunderstorm swept through the area to my West and put on quite a show. I enjoy non-destructive thunderstorms – have since I was a kid – and seeing them from a couple miles away allows for some fantastic viewing. Feeding off the late afternoon heat, the storm boiled into the sky and passed near enough to drive me indoors with rain. With sunset in full gear and the rain easing off, I walked to a small clearing near the house and watched as the storm tracked neatly to the South leaving a perfectly clear sky behind.

I should have taken my camera, but once the show got started I wasn’t about to leave. Nature offers few intermissions. As the sun slid over the horizon of trees and hills to the West and the thunderstorm edged away South, rays of light caught the upper portions of the stormclouds and painted them gold. The lower clouds faded from orange and red to maroon and gray with a beauty and sublety that fixed me in place. Occasional flickers of lightning brightened the main cloud column. Evening mist – steam – filled the rambling valley I overlooked and a crescent moon finished the masterpiece of land and sky in a bright sliver against the deepening blues of coming night. Only a madman would have left to fetch a camera.

It would have been beautiful on film, no doubt, a stunning photo of summer evening, but paper and pixels could never do it justice. There are some things that eyes need to see for themselves, that hands need to feel and lungs need breathe. How do you accurately describe the taste of a ripe peach? Words, visuals, images only go so far.

So I stood in rain-peppered awe following the storm’s southerly push and the sun’s splendid farewell until color had faded from the uppermost tip of the anvil cloud and the moon ruled the dark sky. It was so beautiful. At times like that I feel filled with child-like wonder, as if some part of the world were suddenly new again and I got to experience it first-hand.

I suppose in a way it was. Every day is new. Every living thing grows and changes. Non-living things are acted upon and altered. It is an ever-shifting world so, yes, I suppose every thing is always just a little bit new.

I find that unspeakably encouraging.

God’s Thumbnail

That’s what some call a crescent moon, the thumbnail of God. Kind of goes along with the idea that “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” Whatever your beliefs, it is a beautiful sight.

Last night I stayed up late, until 3 AM today actually. Time flies when you’re having fun, as they say. I hadn’t intended to, had made no plans to do so, but I got in a groove and rode it as far as I dared, which happened to be three hours into the next day. See, I love to write. You’d never know it, coming to this blog – my organizational skills sometimes leave much to be desired and I’ve been unexpectedly busy since last October – but I write in some form nearly every day.

Last night I got on a roll and didn’t want to stop. See, it’s been a long time since I felt like I really connected with the old muse and had more to jot down than just a line or two. It’s been years. It’s tantamount to a chocoholic being limited to one Hershey’s kiss every day for two and a half years, then suddenly one night finding a great stash with case upon case of kisses and all other manner of chocolatey goodness. When I found my word stash, I wasn’t about to close the door and walk away after just one treat.

Which is how we return to God’s thumbnail. About 2:00 AM or so, I noticed an orange glow in the trees to the East and dismissed it as a neighbor’s polelight. I kept writing. In the vicinity of 2:30 AM I realized it was a low crescent moon, tinted by the atmosphere and just beginning to rise. I watched it for a while, still half-obscured by treetops, and then went back to my words.

Beauty is such a simple thing. At 3:00 AM I left one thing of beauty for another, walking outside and standing in the yard under a hot, silent sky to stare at a sliver of dusty planetary satellite in its slowly fading orbit. And I was awed.

I can see why some call it the thumbnail of God.

The Bee

Yesterday was gorgeous here. It felt like late spring, a good three months early. Since it was so nice out, I spent part of the beautiful day in a swing, basking in the dazzling sunshine in just my shirt sleeves. The swing is free-standing, upholstered in canvas, and seats three people but I swung there to and fro alone. Or nearly. A loving cat (Bandy) came to visit, jumping into the seat and sharing my cozy cove of sun-lit swing. After an hour or so another visitor came along.

I can’t say he was a stranger – we’d met a couple hours before at a picnic lunch just across the yard – but he had only been passing through then. This time he sat a spell. On my hand. A little bee, as nice as you please, lit on my wrist and preened unhurriedly in the warm afternoon. I moved slowly, he made no threat to sting, and we spent a lovely half-hour together.

He was so very beautiful. For many long moments I studied the downy hairs on his thorax, the neat black and yellow stripes on his abdomen, his minute antennae and large dark eyes. I found myself fairly smitten. He tickled the fine hairs on my arm and hand as he ambled around, exploring the strange scape, searching for the perfect angle of sun. We had a lovely little conversation while the cat looked on in sleepy apathy. What wonderful neighbors, I thought.

But he had only stopped to visit and eventually bade us farewell. With a tiny shirring of wings he lifted off and buzzed away, headed vaguely west in the bright slant of afternoon.

I only hope I am so lucky as to enjoy more such days in the weeks and months and years to come.

Technicolor Life

My favorite color is blue. It has been for many many years. But I find that the older I get, the harder it is to pick just one; all colors are beautiful. I never liked chartreuse until I noticed that sunlight in fresh spring grass carried that color. Gray never seemed exciting until I saw it churning in the sky and ocean after a storm. I was never very fond of pink until those tiny, delicate crocuses bloomed in front of the house, and the rose bush shed great handfuls of bright pink petals on the sidewalk.

Somewhere, everything is beautiful. Maybe not in the same place or at the same time as anything else, but every thing has its own beauty. I may not enjoy a wine-colored shirt, but wine-colored autumn leaves or wine edging on green ivy is a different story.

Years ago a close friend and published poet urged me to write a poem about color (I fancied I had a bit of talent back then). There were rules, of course, to make the process more interesting, including that the entire poem could contain only one basic color and anything mentioned must pertain to it. To really challenge myself (cocky as I was) I chose what I thought was the most boring color in the crayon box (brown) and spent several days refining my little creative attempt. The results were hardly better than mediocre but it changed my perspective completely. In looking for “brown” things worth writing about, I found unexpected beauty everywhere.

I’ve never stopped looking for similar unexpected beauties, and have never stopped finding them.